While on the topic of masochism it is necessary to warn all young women that in no sense is self-sacrifice the object of a healthy marriage. The self-sacrifice which is so lauded in theologies is a sacrifice of egoistic impulse gratification. In the face of a great erotic exaltation there can be no such thing as a thought of sacrifice. No woman really in love can perceive anything but gain in really erotic action, for if she knows herself she realizes that her strongest impulses are those of Eros.
§ 178
Any conflict in her psyche is between the erotic and the egoistic-social impulses. The only inhibitions against the erotic impulses, as everywhere, appear to be the egoistic-social ones, though it has been pointed out that even the erotic instinct itself contains an innate antithesis that might cause a conflict even were the egoistic-social influences minimized or even removed.
One suspects that in the woman these unconscious doubts must come primarily from not having been completely controlled, so completely in the erotic sphere that no egoistic-social impulses are for the time perceptible. A woman of a highly refined nature whose husband’s erotic control is not forceful enough thus to expunge totally all egoistic-social impulses for the time being, will have a certain number of them not disposed of.
It thus happens that such a married woman, when loved by another than her husband and yielding to him, will in so doing obliterate even this residue of egoistic-social inhibitions. This explains why an illicit love is to them so powerful a stimulus. They observe a sudden separation of the two spheres of impulse in themselves, and they realize the illimitable enhancement of the erotic motive over the egoistic-social, the latter naturally appearing as dross against the gold of the erotic. If in the clandestine love they have swept away all egoistic-social conventions, they have practically rendered themselves subject to erotic impulses alone. Thus the very fact of this love being illicit appears to render it purely erotic, absolute, all-comprehensive, the conflict settled beforehand.
§ 179
Freud in his paper on the love life already referred to[26] makes the observation that there is a type of “love” in a certain class of men in which the man seems to prefer as his loved one a woman who is at least nominally possessed by another man. His attentions to her are carried on as if he were rescuing her from some oppressor. In extreme instances he often professes to be solicitous for her virtue, which consists in his eyes only in not being used by the other man. Freud continues that the other man from whom this type of lover wishes to rescue the woman represents this lover’s own father, the woman his mother, and he himself is the little boy in the original family triangle where the son, according to Freud, is always jealous of the father and continually trying to get his mother away from the father. The “love” type here described is another instance of the compulsion to repeat, referred to in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
It should be the privilege of the husband to sweep away all egoistic-social inhibitions. He should see to it that his actions throughout his married life are such that his wife makes to him the total surrender here implied. If he does not, he has not taken all the steps he might, to render his marriage absolutely happy.
§ 180
It is likely that the woman who responds thus erotically to the illicit love situation, because love is thus cleared of all egoistic-social inhibitions, may be the counterpart of the man just described. If he wishes to rescue her from a personality, apparently her husband, but in reality the father influence (from the point of view of the lover), so she may wish to be rescued, i.e., removed from all influence of authority—the father influence in her own personality. For in the unconscious the father factor represents the egoistic-social impulses. It is the father who requires compliance with egoistic-social demands. And whoever can sweep away all these influences symbolically rescues her from her own father. It should be, and in many cases indeed is, the husband that does this; and if he does it completely there is no motive for illicit love.